


After The Fact

by pleasesir



Category: The Bad Batch
Genre: Developing Relationship, Enthusiastic Consent, F/M, Porn Without Plot, THEY WERE CANNIBALS MY DUDES, mentions of cannibalism because like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 02:22:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14885811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pleasesir/pseuds/pleasesir
Summary: i'll watch anything with jason mamoa in it and especially anything where he speaks with a gruff accent and never wears a shirt. here's my contribution to the as-yet-empty bad batch fandom





	After The Fact

**Author's Note:**

> i'll watch anything with jason mamoa in it and especially anything where he speaks with a gruff accent and never wears a shirt. here's my contribution to the as-yet-empty bad batch fandom

“What’s your name?” Arlen asks over the campfire after she’s escaped Comfort. Honey is comfortably pressed against his side, his big hand in her nest of curls. She’s smiling, the first time Arlen’s ever seen her do that. Even as her rabbit cooks, she’s smiling. 

“S’ my name,” he says, indicating the MIAMI MAN across his chest. 

“That’s not a name.” It’s a monocle, a moniker, something like that. Not a real name. He shrugs. “What’s your _name?_ ” she presses, itching at the stump of her leg under the prosthetic. “C’mon, I know for certain your mama didn’t name you _Miami Man_.”

For a long moment, he’s silent, before he sighs. “Che.” 

“Really?”

“Sure. S’ as good as any.” She squints, suspicious, but he doesn’t seem to be laughing at her.

The firelight sends strange flickers across his harsh cheekbones. Something low in her belly tightens. She knows why she’s here-she’s not his kid. They’re not gonna be friends. She remembers the other fire, just before he got shot, with him leaning over her, shadows under his eyes. She’d practically felt his hands on her, spanning her waist, hurting a little in the best way.  
She can feel him watching her now, a smirk on his face. He’s not the kind of man who cares about much. She’ll fuck him eventually, and he doesn’t mind waiting, she can tell. It pisses her off and turns her on at the same time. 

“Well, my name’s Arlen.” Che and Honey are watching her now, both with the same remote eyes. Feels like they’re stripping her skin clean off. 

“I know.” 

Of course he knows. Honey probably told him. They’re probably psychic or something. Cannibalism gave them ESP. She has to bite her lip on a giggle. For a moment nothing’s real, blurring. Honey is a little tiger cub and he’s the tiger, watching her with slit yellow eyes. She shakes her head and they’re human again. 

Ever since she was dropped off in the desert, nothing’s felt solid, except Che. He’s too much there for her brain to shake out of place. It’s almost as addicting as the coke she used to snort with the shitty ex who got her put in here. But her ex never made her feel like this, a little high, slick between her thighs. She’s never known a man like Che.

She can feel herself flushing as his eyes track over her, lingering on her mouth, her thighs. She crosses them, running a finger under the hem of her shorts. How long has it been since she last got laid? A year, at least. She spent a couple months in jail, spitting, furious, before they decided that it was pointless to try and rehabilitate a homeless girl who’s been thieving for longer than she attended school. So they put her in here. She watches the fire dance, aware of Che’s eyes on her. Eventually, she falls asleep.  
+  
+  
When she wakes up, there’s warmth curled against her belly, the fire in embers at her toes. She twitches the prosthetic away, afraid of it being melted without her noticing.

When the warmth at her stomach moves, she realizes it’s Honey, and Arlen puts her nose into her curls. There’s a comfort in the child smell of her, and the way she snuffles, rolling over to press her face into Arlen’s chest. Arlen runs a hand up her back, cradling her. She’s never considered herself maternal, but children are rare here. Or, they’re rare until the Dream’s wives start having their babies.

When Arlen looks away from Honey’s sleeping face, she realizes Che is still awake, crouched over the fire warming his hands. He’s close enough for her to touch his ankle, exposed beneath the cuff of his pants. The first streaks of sunlight are beginning to show in the sky. 

“What’re you doing up?” she mumbles, hiding her face in the flesh of her bad arm. 

“Slept. Some.” He stirs the ashes with a stick; Honey’s rabbit is long gone. 

“Well, m’sleeping more.”

She feels his touch a second later, hand spreading over the bone of her shoulder. “You’re soft,” he says, and Arlen knows it isn’t a compliment. She grits her teeth against complaints, against excuses. Out here, strength isn’t the only thing that matters. Arlen’s always been clever. A sneaky little bitch, her mom used to say. Able to wiggle out of almost anything. Arlen got away from the cannibals with only two limbs. She tricked Che. She managed to get Honey out of the Dream’s mansion. She opens her mouth, but Che’s thumb strokes over the wing of her back. “Tonto.”

“What’s that mean?” she asks, twisting to look at him. 

“Means soft.” 

From the twist of smile on his face, it means more than soft. She frowns, not liking being mocked. “See how fuckin’ soft I am with my foot in your ass.” 

“Only got one leg. You’d fall over.” The full force of his grin takes her by surprise, sends warmth spiraling down her spine til she’s almost fond, and can’t help the smile herself. 

“It’d be worth it.”  
+  
+  
“Mira mira mira, Honey, look,” Che says later on that day, after Arlen napped for a couple hours and they set off across the wasteland, back to the trailer where Che and Honey make their home.

He’s holding a bird, a little thing with a broken wing that chirps, seemingly content in Che’s big hands. Honey takes it from him, strokes along its beak with one chubby finger. “Mine?”

“Yours,” Che promises. She beams.  
+  
+  
They reach the trailer before nightfall, when even worse than Che hunts the desert. People looking for the weakest to pick off, to rape and murder for the sake of it. They’re the type of people Comfort was formed to keep out. Arlen finds it kind of funny that even a society of outcasts has outcasts. 

“Y’all live here?” Arlen asks, staring at the decaying human limbs scattered around the place. 

“We are cannibals,” Che mocks, putting a heavy arm around her shoulder, Arlen bending a little under his weight. He makes her feel small, when Arlen’s whole life has been spent trying to look bigger than she is. She moves away. 

“You shouldn’t eat people,” she says, which is a rule she learned when she was five and trying to bite everyone. She was a wild child. She _is_ a wild adult. Nothing’s changed. 

“Have to eat,” he grunts, pushing a strand of hair back from Honey’s face before sending her off to find bugs for her bird. “What else should I do? Go back, to Comfort? Beg…for them to help me?” he says in that slow, measured way he has of speaking.

“No! I just…” She thinks of waking up on her back with two limbs missing, and the sense of utter helplessness that has never gone away. Shivering, she inches closer to him, til the shoulder of her good arm brushes his bicep. “We’re still people. They-” She swings her arm out, indicating the people beyond the gates. The people who put them there. “They caged us up like animals, but we’re _not_.” He grunts, but doesn’t argue. “And people could have diseases,” she pushes. “Half the people in Comfort have an STD. Do you want Honey to get one?”

Honey, his only weak point. The only way she can see any cracks in him. 

“No.” He shakes his shaggy head, seeming to think, and stalks into the trailer. Arlen grins.  
+  
+  
She falls asleep in the dim twilight, wakes to the feel of fingers trailing along her side, over the skin exposed by her riding-up tank. 

“You’re soft,” Che says again, but it doesn’t sound like an insult this time. She rolls to her back, grateful that the bed in this trailer is so wide, so plush. She hasn’t slept on a bed like this since…she’s never slept on a bed like this.

Che is there, half kneeling over her, one hand fisted in the sheets, the other curled over her ribs, just under her breast. He must be able to feel her heart pounding. His hair hangs in his face; there’s only one light on outside. A compromise, he told her earlier, with Honey, who is scared of the dark and used to insist on sleeping in his bed every night. 

Arlen doesn’t know how to respond, licks her lips with a small sound in the dark. He groans, bends his head to her stomach. His breath comes out in warm puffs just over her belly button. Arlen shifts to get her legs open, press the inside of her knees to his ribs. Each expanding breath spreads her open a little. 

“I’m not calling you Miami Man when we fuck,” she tells him, tangling her fingers in the rich curls of his hair. 

“Who said I was gonna fuck you?” he grumbles, and Arlen scoffs. That needs no answer. 

“Come up here and kiss me,” she demands, tugging him up by the hair til he’s over her on his elbows, blocking out any light. She’s not sure who leans forward first, but he’s kissing her, and for a moment she remembers he _eats people_ , that she’s kissing a man who _eats people_ , and considers pushing him away. He’d go, she’s sure of it. Then he’s sliding a hand up the back of her tank, lifting her easy as breathing, and Arlen decides to ignore it when he sucks her tongue into his mouth. 

She had expected…different. She had expected him to tear her clothing off, ruin her favorite pair of smiley faced shorts, but he’s gentle, keeping the one broad, warm palm spread at the small of her back, and the other trailing up her thigh, underneath the hem of her shorts, never dipping inside. Not like he’s nervous (she imagines he’s never nervous) but like he’s taking his time. There’s nowhere to go after this. No jobs to wake up to. Only endless sunny days. And Honey. 

She hitches her leg up over his hip, trying to get him to grind into her. Most of the guys she’s fucked have wanted it fast, and not really cared whether Arlen got off or not, so she learned how to take care of herself pretty early. The right movement of her body, the precise movement of the muscles in her pelvis…Arlen takes care of herself.

Sometimes Arlen forgets her arm is gone. She reaches up to claw at his back, spur him on, and skids what’s left of her elbow over his skin. He doesn’t flinch. He seems content to kiss her til she’s breathless, sinking back into the pillows and feeling like something of a conquest as they break apart and he grins down at her. A smile takes ten years off his face and makes him boyish, makes something complicated churn in Arlen’s belly.

“You can fuck me, y’know. I’m all lubed up and stuff.” To emphasize, she moves his hand to the button of her shorts. He undoes it easily, waiting. “You gonna fuck me or not?” she snaps, annoyed. There’s heat in her now, and he’s taking too long.

“I might.” He’s amused by her, shifting til he’s kissing down her neck, across the wings of her collarbones, pausing to suck one of her breasts into his mouth, leave a mark there.

When he starts kissing down her stomach she stops him, confused. “What’re you doing?” He skims his teeth along the waistband of her shorts with that feral look on his face that makes Arlen catch her breath. 

“You ever been eaten out, hermosa?” All said while he shimmies her shorts down her legs, removes the prosthetic so she can sigh with relief as he rubs the scars there. 

She’s never felt so spoiled in her life, sagging against him as she responds, “Of course not.” She’s naked from the waist down now, tank pushed up over her breasts. He’s still fully clothed. Or, as fully clothed as he ever is. He grunts, and she’s about to tell him to fuck off or fuck _her_ when he uses two fingers to spread her open, delicate as a queen drinking tea, and licks at her cunt like a dog. 

Her legs try to close immediately, shocked, but his broad shoulders are keeping them open, and it feels good. Great. Amazing. Slick wet heat but so soft, her hips trying to roll into it, chasing the feeling. She doesn’t realize she’s making noise until Che laughs and bites her inner thigh. She just knows he’s marking a place for himself to come back to, and it pisses her off while at the same time she grins.

“Cállate. You’ll wake Honey.” She’s thinking more about how wet she is right now, how she’s soaking the sheets and, when she reaches out to touch his chin, Che’s face. He kisses the tips of her fingers, and it makes her chest hurt. She’s never fucked anyone like this before. Not anyone who was nice to her. 

When he goes back to eating her out, she curls her legs around the back of his neck and holds him there, hoping she’s not hurting him too bad as he licks, slow and patient with her squirming, pinning her hips down with one hand so she can’t move too much. 

She’s riding his face, she realizes, grinding her hips down against his tongue, voice going breathy. “Fuck… _fuck_. I’m gonna-” She manages to twist just right, his tongue sliding wetly along the side of her clit, and comes all over his face in one shuddering moment. She’s never had an orgasm last this long before, in crests, jumping a little when he sucks hard at where she’s most sensitive just to be an asshole. 

When Che lifts his head again, she thumbs over his wet, plush mouth, inside and over his tongue. No guy she’s been with has ever let Arlen fuck his mouth before. With Che, his eyes just narrow, heated, and he bites her thumb. “S’good, no?” 

“ _Real_ good,” she sighs, not caring if he makes fun of her for it, drawing him up til he’s over her again, kissing Arlen with a mouth that tastes of her own slick. She wonders if a cannibalism joke would be in poor taste right now, and decides it would. Instead, she lets herself go all limp and pleased, reaches down to touch his cock over those ridiculous pants. “You’re gonna fuck me now,” Arlen says, and she’s not asking. 

He sighs into her mouth when she pushes those pants down past his ass, and it’s easier than it’s ever been to slip his cock into her. Heaven knows she’s already wet enough, though he’s more than thick enough for her to feel the stretch. Sometimes she forgets how big he is. She sure as hell isn’t forgetting now. He’s fucking into places she’s never touched before, blooming her open.  
He moves in her just right for both of them to feel the friction, feel how he’s testing the give of her, marking a place for himself inside her. It feels like he’s fucking in her deeper and deeper, never having to stop. It hurts, in that good way that sharpens everything, makes her thighs tense and release.

Arlen digs her teeth into his shoulder because the alternative is screaming and she wouldn’t be able to face Honey in the morning. He’s muttering in a flood of raspy Spanish that she doesn’t understand, slipping a hand between their bodies to rub at Arlen’s clit til she’s coming so quickly she’s almost surprised by it, digging the nails of her good hand into his shoulder. He lets out a breath, so quiet she doesn’t realize he’s coming til she feels the hot flood of it inside her. 

“Did you just…” He nips at Arlen’s neck, pulls her leg up higher over his hip, doesn’t let her squirm away. 

“Don’t worry,” he’s murmuring into her hair, sleepy in that satisfied way men always get after sex. 

“Um, I’m worried,” she tries to snap, but it’s hard to truly feel it when he’s so warm on top of her, and her pussy’s still twitching with the aftershocks of a really good orgasm. 

“M’clean. And there’s pills. Somewhere.” 

Arlen’s trusted him this far; she decides to trust him a little more, sinks back into the sheets with a smile on her face. “Fine. Then come and kiss me s’more.” Luckily for her, he’s happy to do so.

**Author's Note:**

> tonto means "soft-headed" in spanish...it's one of those words that has multiple meanings and it made me laugh. also i had no idea how to write in that arlen murdered what i assume was honey's mom right in front of her...so i did what the movie did, and ignored it


End file.
